Have you heard of Google's upcoming "Caffeine" update?  It is big news - a complete rebuild of Google's search platform!  Searchengineland.com summed it up nicely, "we can guess that this new infrastructure may include ways of crawling the web more comprehensively, determining reputation and authority (possibly beyond the link graph and what’s typically thought of as PageRank), and returning more relevant results more quickly, although Google’s Matt Cutts told me that the changes are 'primarily in how we index'".  This should be important to any website owner. Google controls such a large control of the search engine market that even small changes in a site's placement in SERPs can drastically affect the web site traffic.

Google's Matt Cutts confirmed a few days ago that this update will not be pushed out completely until after the Holidays.  I guess they don't want to rock the boat too much during the big holiday shopping season.  Matt specifically mentions that he wants web masters to breathe easy and not worry about the update until after the holidays have passed. Personally, I'm a little disappointed. I was really looking forward to this upcoming release. While I didn't roll up my sleeves and do any major testing in their sandbox (which is now closed), I did check out some of my sites - and client sites. I liked what I saw. I think this update will really help clean out sites that relied on spammy techniques to rank well and make room for more worthwhile sites - like mine! :)  I wish the update was hitting more quickly, but I guess we will all have to wait.